Coffee With Hilary and Les from State of Mind Hypnosis and Training Centre
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Offering ideas and answering questions on how to use your mind for growth, happiness and ultimately peace.
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Coffee With Hilary and Les from State of Mind Hypnosis and Training Centre
Mindfulness Unveiled: Seeing, Understanding, and Embracing Emotions
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How can understanding our emotions transform us? Drawing wisdom from Tibetan Buddhist monk Pema Chodron and Cal Banyan's "The Secret Language of Feelings," we delve into observing and managing our emotional responses. Learn how identifying the meanings behind emotions like sadness, depression, anger, and shame can foster self-awareness. We highlight actionable steps to recognize and question these feelings, guiding listeners toward effective emotional management and a more grounded existence.
Meditation offers more than just a break from negative thoughts—it can be a path to mental clarity and mindfulness. We explore the practice of meditation, emphasizing the importance of non-judgment and self-compassion. Our recommendations include literature by Pema Chodron and John Kabat-Zinn, perfect for beginners. Additionally, we touch on the practicality of meditation in daily life, including its synergy with cognitive-behavioral therapy. For those curious about hypnosis, we extend an invitation to connect with the State of Mind community and explore the transformative potential of our hypnosis services.
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Welcome and thank you for joining us for Coffee with Hilary and Les. Brought to you by State of Mind Hypnosis and Training Center, located in the heart of the Kawartha Lakes, this is our almost daily community podcast about the mind and how you might change it in the most simple and helpful ways. Every day, we sit staring at the lake and sipping our coffee, having a chat about hypnosis and how to make those meaningful adjustments to our state of mind, because nothing is more important than your state of mind. Okay, we're on the line, on the line outside.
Speaker 2:Okay, we're on the line, on the line outside, beautiful day.
Speaker 1:A little bit cooler. Yeah, it's almost fall.
Speaker 2:Next thing we know, it's next summer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I am not being mindful.
Speaker 2:No, that's the thing, eh, being mindful. Well, I just thought that, given we talked about the past, present and future, and we talked about the significance of situating your mind in the present, because that's the only thing that there is.
Speaker 2:And it just made sense to talk about mindfulness, although in so many ways mindfulness doesn't make sense, I think for a lot of people that the idea of it sounds beautiful and there are like 67 different ways to practice mindfulness. You know, you do a fast Google search and you type in principles of mindfulness and then you get. You know you get the old, old stuff, the eightfold path. But you'll also get, you know, the seven C's of mindfulness, four T's of mindfulness. Everybody's got some trademarkable, copyrightable methodology and it's kind of funny how we've taken this ancient, ancient practice of sitting and just being present and it's become complex and confusing and it's become business and money-making.
Speaker 2:And in truth, to me I know I'm sounding cynical, but it's one of the most natural things for human beings to do. We come out here in the morning and we bring our coffee and it is really easy to just be fascinated by watching the kingfisher hop from tree to tree, observing, hovering over the water, looking for a fish. And you know, for me, you know that's just lovely to be present to that moment. But it's also a fantastic example because there's the kingfisher being completely present in the moment it wants to catch a fish. It's observing its surroundings, it's prepared to respond to whatever comes up and it's completely focused in that moment.
Speaker 2:And I think mindfulness has become well. It's beautiful that it's been understood better and adopted into modern psychology. It's now, you know, most psychologists are learning mindfulness and teaching it to their clients. Most psychotherapists have some understanding of mindfulness and are teaching it to their clients, and it's the way the population of the world, for thousands of years, has tried to cope with being in this world. It's no easy thing sometimes, but I suppose we have our own, you know, state of mind, principles of mindfulness.
Speaker 1:Though they've never been written down.
Speaker 2:Yep, but I think it's good to talk about mindfulness and where the practice of meditation fits into that. Um it is, it is not necessary to meditate to be mindful, and it is certainly possible I know from my own experience, um to be uh uh meditating and not very mindful.
Speaker 2:Yeah not very mindful, but I think that the two ideas being aware of the ideas that guide you towards mindfulness and being aware of some simple practices to use in meditation you know, calm stillness I think that's some worthwhile stuff. It's an interesting tool, it's a worthwhile tool. It's interesting.
Speaker 1:As we were sitting here, this came to me and I'm going to try to explain it, and I don't know if it's going to make sense or not, but I feel like it does in some way. Know if it's going to make sense or not, but I feel like it does in some way. So how, how do you become mindful when every thought seems to be in the past? You know what I mean. Like we have thoughts going on and going on and then suddenly we go oh my gosh, what have I been thinking for the last 10 minutes? You know so, really, you know. How do you, how do you slow down and become in the present, in the present moment, because every thought seems to be in the past, even if it was a nanosecond in the past? You know?
Speaker 2:well it's. There is thought, and then there is what you're thinking of, which really leads you to the primary methodology of being mindful, which is to simply be aware of your thoughts and your emotions, to step back from them. To step back from I am upset to oh, there's upset in me right now, and then to examine it. What am I upset about? What's causing that upset? What can I do about that upset?
Speaker 1:But not be engaged in the upset.
Speaker 2:You know it's the old, old buddhist principle that's how I learned it anyway was to just observe your thoughts and your emotions. Don't be them, don't engage them. Just take a step back and notice that you can be the observer and not the experiencer. You know, and we talk about you know, I talk about lots with my clients the idea that you can observe your thoughts. You are not your thoughts.
Speaker 2:I am not what I think, I am the thinker and I can change my thoughts and there's in that awareness, I think there's a magic moment that allows you to step back and see yourself and to see yourself right there in the.
Speaker 2:You know you've just got up, you got a million things going on in your household, you got people all around you doing all kinds of crazy things. It causes you to feel chaotic and upset and anxious and a little bit angry and a little bit frustrated and all these emotions, with all this stuff going on around you, it really sucks and pulls you in. But to be able to just step back from it for a second and just observe it, look at the chaos in my home and in that moment, to realize that you're not your thoughts, you're not this moment, you're not these activities, you're not the reactor to all these things. You're not the reactor to all these things. You are a mind that has the ability to choose whether or not to react to these things. That discovery to me is well, that just changes everything from that point on.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and I would even take it a step further. This is just coming to me now. It's amazing how much stuff, just as we're talking here. But, um, I was thinking about how we say to clients to see it as, oh, there is anger, right, but still, sometimes, most times, they they see it as within them because they're feeling right. So mindfulness says to us to see the feeling without judgment, there is anger. You know, oh, I would even and maybe this is a whole other ballgame but I would take it a step further and say there is anger in my energy field. So it's outside of the body and maybe that's a whole other tangent, but no, I think that leads us to the importance of educating yourself and understanding what emotions mean.
Speaker 2:I think, as we observe, these things can be observed and broken down into pieces. For example, you know we all have emotions and we experience emotions differently, but we all have really the same kinds of emotions. We all experience fear in all kinds of degrees. We all experience anger in all kinds of degrees. You know we all experience loss and sadness in all kinds of degrees. You know we all experience loss and sadness in all kinds of degrees and we all experience these things in our body. Where the emotion? And if you ask somebody and you say when you're angry, where do you feel it, you know it's an enormous step for people Like you know.
Speaker 2:I'll work with clients and I'll just they'll say I want to work with anger, I want to stop being so angry all the time, and I think that's a beautiful, beautiful goal. And I'll say, well, where in your body do you feel that anger? And they'll go what I feel it all over and I'll say, well, pause for a minute and think of the last time that you were angry and try to locate where you feel it in the body. You know, and then they start to narrow it down. Maybe it's in their belly, maybe it's in their chest, maybe it's in their head. Some of them feel it in their shoulders, right, like I've heard just about anything you know but the feet? Nobody ever says I feel anger in my feet. But the point is everybody's different, everybody feels it in different places and that is huge to see the difference between anger or, more importantly, emotions and feelings.
Speaker 2:Emotions create feelings. The saying is that feelings are where emotions meet the body and we can have various kinds of emotions. But, more importantly, we can feel those emotions in varying degrees and, as a result, we feel them in varying densities within the body. So to start to be aware of that, geez, when I get angry I really feel it in my throat, which really reflects. You know, I'm one of those people who talks when they're angry, right, getting it out.
Speaker 2:So it's so cool to just identify the difference between an emotion and a feeling and just taking that time to see the relationship between the emotion and the feeling and the degrees of the emotion, with the degrees of the feeling and the compelling nature that sometimes that emotion is so big and so important and the feeling is so intense in our body that we are compelled to act on it. And sometimes, you know, we talk about just a little tweak of emotion. We we feel the emotion not very intensely and we don't really feel it much in the body and we don't feel compelled to act on it or respond to it at all. And that process of observing and seeing the difference between an emotion and a feeling is such an awakening thing and such an empowering thing, because the instant you can look at something, then you're actually not part of it anymore and you're actually in a position to respond to it differently.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I feel like what I'm teaching myself and what I'm teaching others right now is that once you have the emotion and you're seeing the feeling outside of yourself a little bit and that's why I kind of say like in my energy field instead of in in me, because it's kind of like when it's in the body, you get really sucked in. There's like this spiral, you know, out of control feeling almost. So when it's out, in front of us or around us, we then have the power to ask it you know what, what, what? What message do you have for me? And in that message it's amazing, this happens every single time. I haven't had a time yet that it hasn't happened like this.
Speaker 1:Where, there, you know, I say to my client that that feeling, that crap feeling that you've been having in the body, now that it's outside of the body you're looking at it differently. What message does it have for you? And always it's a message. It's a good message. It's like a message of um change. It's a message of of curiosity, of looking deeper, of understanding, of love even sometimes. And and then, you know, I say to the client isn't it curious how such a crap feeling can actually be telling you what to do, or in this moment, or how to look at life, or how to look at yourself or others. I haven't seen it yet as you're a bad person or something. There's nothing bad that comes from it, but we feel it. So what I? You know what?
Speaker 1:What ends up happening is the client recognizes that that emotion, that feeling that they're it's going on, um, is actually just like a signpost in the road saying hey, hey, look over here, like something's going on. You need to pay attention to this and maybe go in this direction or this direction. But of course we get sucked into it because we're not being in that mindful state. I'm trying to bring it back around to the topic, but we're not being in that present moment state without the judgment. Usually we feel anger and we start to beat ourselves up. Why are you angry about this? Oh my gosh. This happens every time, like, and then we're angry at ourselves and it's just a never-ending tunnel into nowhere land yeah, there's some great teachers out there.
Speaker 2:What you're describing, I always think of someone named Pema Chodron, p-e-m-a-c-h-o-d-r-o-n. Pema Chodron she's a Buddhist monk. She's an American who became a Tibetan Buddhist monk and has really advanced, and I believe she's still the abbot of Gampo Abbey, which is a Buddhist monastery in Nova Scotia. Anyway, she's written tons and tons of books and she's done all kinds of recordings. She's really a wonderful teacher on how to be aware of your mind and, as she says, not let it carry you away. She talks about your thoughts and emotions carrying you away and when you can step back and observe them, then you can do these kinds of things like you described, that you can start learning from these emotions and then you can start to be less attached to your emotions and less often are you carried away by them. And this is the part where where people get, I think, get motivated to make a change, because our emotions can grab us, they can carry us away, and then we say and do things that later we feel guilt and shame over. They cause us to do things that cause us to dislike ourselves, and that's a horrible spiral, right, and it's this sense that you know I can't, I shouldn't let myself get so emotional. There's nothing wrong with the emotion. Emotions are positive and negative, and they can lead us into wonderful places and understandings. It's when we let them carry us away with a particular meaning that we really lose control, right? So I also see value in Cal Banyan, one of our teachers, a hypnotist down in Texas, and he wrote a book called the Secret Language of Feelings, which I really like. And we teach these ideas because we're trained in Cal's processes. We teach these ideas to our clients and I think it's really important for us all to just pause and say well, I'm having this feeling in my body, which is what emotion? And then I identify the emotion and then I ask myself well, what does that emotion mean? Right? What is the meaning of that emotion? You know, when we're feeling sadness, it means that we've lost something, that something is is moving away. And if you're feeling grief and you're feeling sadness, which is different from depression, sadness is a loss, whereas depression feeling unable to act it's really about that sense that I don't know what to do. I just don't know what to do anymore, right? And when? I can see the difference between my sadness and my depression and I can see where I feel them differently in different places in my body. I experience them differently at different times during the day and in my life, different events. Right, I start to separate the meaning of those things.
Speaker 2:You know, anger is I've been treated unfairly. This is a huge one. I'm always working with men and I really like this work. It's amazing watching people really change their own lives when they start to look at their anger and ask themselves well, what does it mean? Well, it means I'm being treated unfairly.
Speaker 2:And then the natural question is to explore that. Right, I'm feeling sad. It means I lost something. What have you lost? Examine that. I'm feeling angry, which means I've been treated unfairly. So who has treated me unfairly and why? And what really happened? And was that really about me?
Speaker 2:Right, and asking these kinds of questions guides us towards deciphering and deconstructing these emotions Resentment, guilt, shame, shame is I've treated someone else unfairly. And stepping back and looking at that, well, what did I do and why did I do it and what can I do about it? You know so that first principle of mindfulness just observing and being aware, not getting, as Pema Chodron says, carried away with it, not being carried off into the reaction to it, but to step back and use some of these simple tools and say, well, what am I feeling, what's the emotion attached to that, what would that emotion mean? And then, from there, allow yourself to observe it rather than pull it in. It's kind of like pushing it out instead of pulling it in. I mean, that's a nice metaphor. I put it out in front of me rather than pull it in me and try to become it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think, um, I was thinking about this the other day. I was making a little reel for a meditation or some or a technique I can't remember now for a meditation or some or technique, can I remember now? Um, but it dawned on me that this is what people mean when they say feel your emotions and move through the emotion. You know, I I had never really thought before until that moment that a lot of people, a lot of books, self-help books, say to move through your emotions, but they don't tell you how. They just say move through your emotion. Well, what does that mean? Right, feel into the emotion, move through it.
Speaker 2:What do you think it means?
Speaker 1:Well, I feel I know now, to a certain extent, it is to feel it, it is to recognize it, and I think it is. It does. I think there is that next step of asking yourself what does this mean? What is this telling me? And it's amazing, as soon as you have that answer from the emotion, most times, unless there's a little more deeper work to do it, it dissipates.
Speaker 2:It really does. It really does as soon as you understand what the emotion means and you're looking at the circumstance around you. And then, as soon as you understand what the emotion means and you're looking at the circumstance around you, and then as soon as you know what it means, it's almost instantaneous.
Speaker 2:You know what you want to do about it yeah right, and as soon as you know what you want to do about it, then the emotion doesn't need to stay.
Speaker 2:And this is why I think that you can't let an emotion flow and be processed until you've spent time with it, and that time might be a half a second, but the point is, you're spending time with it, you're allowing it, you're observing it, you're seeing it, you're understanding it, and that can happen really, really quickly, less than a second, and in that moment you're able to say okay, and in that moment you're able to say, okay, this is what I want to do about this, and then it's important to let it go right. Don't hang on to it, don't think about it later, don't dwell on it. This is, in fact, if you're dwelling on an emotion later in the day, if you're thinking about an experience you had, it's because you haven't processed it. It's because you haven't been able to see through what you should have learned there or what you should have taken from that, or what was best for you in that moment, and that doesn't allow you to let go of it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And that's the thing that isn't healthy, that's the thing that isn't helpful.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's the thing that isn't helpful.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and of course, what it does then is you're busy thinking about some past moment that's in the past that you can do nothing about, that. You're ruminating over what you should have done. I wish I'd said this, I wish I'd done that, I wish I'd just pulled that person. I wish, I wish, I wish. And then that moment in the past, you're now clinging to it, and this is where we talk about trying to be in the present.
Speaker 2:Right being in the present and effectively processing your emotions is going to free you in so many ways. It's not easy, but it's something we don't learn, it's something we don't train. I mean to the parents out there, this is something to teach your children. This is huge. If you can teach your children to understand their emotions and allow them to flow, you will have created an incredibly powerful adult. An incredibly powerful adult. You know, 20 years from now, your children will be so good at this and so practiced at this that they will have a life that's very different from the life that you're having yeah, even just saying what is that emotion telling you right now, even just saying what is that emotion, telling you right now what does the emotion mean, what's the message from the emotion, what's?
Speaker 1:the wisdom.
Speaker 2:What am I to learn from this experience?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I always talk about learning lessons the hard way and the easy way. Learning lessons the easy way, the example I always use is you know, you're seven years old and mom leans down and kisses you on the forehead and says I love you so much, you're such a wonderful person. And that's learning a lesson the easy way, because that's the truth. You know, you are a wonderful person, you're a good person, you always are, you always were, you always will be. You know what interferes with your wonder. Your wonderment, your wonderfulness is simply you know the things that are going on outside you that you feel compelled to deal with. So you know there's a beautiful lesson and mom says I love you, you're wonderful, and you take the message that I'm lovable. And then there's lessons that we learn the hard way, like when we're at school and some teacher says what's wrong with you? Or some teacher says you sit in your seat and you stop moving around. What's wrong with you, or you'll never be able to do this right. And that's learning the lesson the hard way. The hard way is that that lesson should be no, no, no, teacher, you don't understand. I'm lovable and I'm wonderful. And what the teacher is really saying is I don't know how to deal with you, and it's really an idea about the teacher. I don't know how to respond to you, I don't know how to help you, I don't know how to be present to you, I don't know how to do my job, I don't know how to fulfill my vocation in this moment, and their negative reaction to the child is really all about them. But the child takes the wrong lesson from it. There's something wrong with me. I'm not smart enough, I'm not good enough. You know, or you know a natural lesson. I hate that teacher, I hate being in this class, I hate school, I don't want to be in school. And these are all really the wrong lessons from that movement, because it's hard to take the right lesson from it, which is I am lovable and I'm always lovable and I'm always capable, and I can learn this and I can be good at this if someone would just take the time to care about me and teach me. You know, and I say that and I talk about you know, going to the gym, like you don't lift little weights, right, you lift heavy weights, because that's how you get stronger, and so you start off with learning lessons easy way. Mom kisses you on the head and tells you you're wonderful. But then you go out in the world and you got to learn those lessons again, in different contexts, in different situations. And that's when you, you, you stand up for yourself.
Speaker 2:And and you're now 30 years old and you're at work and some boss makes some nasty crack at you and then you remember, no, that's about them, that's not about me, that's their bad day. I don't have to take that on. There's nothing wrong with me. I can learn this. I haven't learned it yet, but I will and and we take on the right lesson from a hard situation. So, learning things the easy way, learning things the hard way, remembering that the message that the lesson is always that I'm lovable, that lesson is always that I'm good enough, and people will challenge your awareness of your good enoughness and your worthiness. People will challenge that, but that's their problem, not yours. Anyway, being present in the moment and realizing the difference between you and me you the actor and me the recipient, understanding the emotion that I'm feeling in a place in my body and what message it's really meant to give me, what lesson I'm here to learn, and then I react better and I think, doing all that without judgment there you go trying big part of mindfulness say some more judgment?
Speaker 1:yeah, I think it's. I think it's important. I mean, if we were to, if we were to listen to the lessons or ask the emotion, what does this mean? And then judge the answer, you know, oh well, that that's not real, or that's not true, or or um, you know I can't do that, or you all these, all these different things that can come up for people, and when you start judging that, then you're just going to fall into that, that spiral again, I believe.
Speaker 1:So, listening to the answer, well, first of all, having the emotion and not judging the emotion, not judging yourself for having an emotion and not judging the emotion, not judging yourself for having an emotion, and in that non-judgment it's so much easier to remove. Put the emotion out of the body in a sense, like have it, have it removed out there in front of you. Let's say, I remember reading a book a long time ago. I can't remember what it was called, maybe the power, power of now, I can't remember exactly, but the person spoke about giving the emotion almost like a persona, right, having it removed from you and, uh, and when you give it that, that persona, it, it doesn't cling to you like it normally does, um, it doesn't, as Les was saying, take you away or whisk you away, and not again not judging. Usually, when we judge, we're in anger, I think, or we're critical.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know I always use. I say that the magic word is should. If you're using the word should, then you're in judgment. So you know something happens and you know I shouldn't have been put in this situation and they shouldn't have said that to me and I should have reacted better and I should have been. And all of that is judgment. All of that is saying that something's good, something's bad, something's good, something's bad. And when you step back from it, we're not denying that you know somebody's nasty reaction to your question, for example, is a good thing.
Speaker 1:It's not a good thing.
Speaker 2:But saying that it's not a good thing and being focused on the fact that it's not a good thing is being really focused on judgment and not being focused on your own peace, on your own response, on your own moving through that experience in a safe and peaceful way. So judgment just leads us astray, right. Judgment takes us off into another direction, and judgment almost always leads us to react badly right, and that will more often than not make the situation worse, make the circumstance that you're in worse. It will intensify it, it will cause it to escalate. It's more likely that you're going to carry it around as something in your past that's going to drag your attention out of the present.
Speaker 2:The act of judgment good or bad is not really a helpful one. Now, don't misunderstand Words are symbols of symbols, and we're all struggling with our communication. I don't mean that you don't choose your preferences or you don't discern between things you want to be involved in and things you don't want to be involved in. But the word judgment really implies condemnation, right, whereas discernment is about preferences. It's about distinguishing in degrees of things that you like and don't like. You know, and I always use, you know, flavors as the best way to tell the difference.
Speaker 2:Right, chocolate? I can say I like chocolate. I like chocolate with a little bit of coffee in it, I like chocolate with a little bit of caramel in it. You know, I prefer chocolate. When I have a choice, it's very, very different than saying chocolate is the best, everything else is crap, right, strawberry is crap, chocolate is only right. So that sort of the difference between discernment this is my preference, this is the way I like it and judgment, which is condemnation. So it's very natural, it's very normal for us all to bump into a circumstance and then judge it as good or bad, but it's not really helpful. It doesn't really get you anywhere. Obs observing it and learning why you don't prefer it, learning why it's not the way you want to do things, learning why there's ways you really like to act in these circumstances. That's discernment and that's valuable and that's useful in the future and that's learning the lesson. I feel like we could. We should spend a minute talking about meditation, though, before we're done.
Speaker 1:Okay, so meditation in terms of mindfulness.
Speaker 2:Well, meditation as a good technique to calm the mind Right. Like I love Pema Chodron, you know our mind runs away on us. It takes off Right. It gets filled with ideas. It gets filled with thoughts. The thoughts are not helpful. The thoughts trigger negative emotions. Those negative emotions dwell in our body. So we've got these negative emotions dwelling in our body as feelings that have got us spun off in some direction where we're not able to just be in the moment anymore, in some direction where we're not able to just be in the moment anymore. We're sometimes triggered to go to similar situations in our past. We're sometimes triggered to go off and wonder if our future can ever be what we want it to be if this present moment doesn't change. It really spins us out.
Speaker 2:And you know, meditation is a practice and that's, I think, the critical word. It's practice. You never have it perfect. It's never. It's never I don't like the word never.
Speaker 2:It's unlikely that you've reached a point that you live in constant meditation, constant awareness of the now. It's unlikely. It's a great goal and you know monks will spend their whole lives committed to trying to accomplish that. And I mean whole lives, I mean like 60, 70 years of meditating for hours every day to try to spend a consistent awareness when they're consider themselves outside meditation, and that they work on meditation to the point where they talk about walking meditation and living meditation so that in their daily interactions with others in the world they're still in that very calm, present state. So it's really just a practice, a way of practicing it, and for me, the value of it is that it breaks the thought pattern. Right, you know you can break.
Speaker 2:I think this is huge.
Speaker 2:If I'm engaged in a negative thought pattern, I got these thoughts that I can't get rid of and I'm just dwelling on things and I can't get rid of it.
Speaker 2:I can do simple things like turn on music and put on my favorite song, and that will guide me out of it. Or I can go and sit down and read a book or watch a movie, and that will break that thought pattern and that will create enormous relief. And so that's basically using an external stimulus to try to break an internal pattern that's going on, whereas meditation is trying to create an internal pattern in the alternative for that negative internal pattern that you're trying to get away from. Sometimes you can't sit down in front of the TV, grab a bag of chips and put on Netflix. Sometimes you're in the middle of your workday and so sitting, going to your office and closing the door, going to some space, going back out to your car, going off property for just 20 minutes and spending time just clearing your mind. That, I think, is incredible value of meditation. Meditation, it's just a training yourself to have more control over what you think about yeah, I think too it's.
Speaker 1:It's a huge, uh opportunity to practice releasing judgment, right? So, um, I can almost guarantee it that anyone who listens to this and tries meditation, the thoughts run away on us, right. We get caught up in our thoughts and sometimes we can be meditating for a few minutes and look back suddenly, suddenly become the observer and look back and go what in the world have I been thinking for this time? And so what I encourage you to do in that moment is not judge yourself, right. So it's this opportunity to practice not judging yourself, because absolutely holding that present moment can be can be quite difficult sometimes in the beginning. So don't beat yourself up for that. Try not to get frustrated. Um, it's part of the process, it's natural. Um, yeah, it's just it's, but it's an opportunity. See it as an opportunity instead of a frustrating endeavor.
Speaker 2:There are literally hundreds of books out there on meditation and some of the ones that I think are fantastic for beginners. Pema Chodron again, she wrote a book on meditation. I love listening to her talk about meditation because she's so honest. Right, she's a monk and she's been doing this and she teaches this and she still talks about how you know things carry her away and she tries to. You know, sometimes her meditation feels like nothing but a struggle to try to be present in the moment.
Speaker 2:You prominence John Kabat, k-a-b-a-t Zinn. John Kabat Zinn's a psychologist who, again a Westerner, who's brought meditation into the fields of cognitive behavioral therapy and you know, and many kinds family systems, therapy there's all kinds of therapy systems out there but he's introduced mindfulness as sort of a modern psychology psychiatric practice for therapy. So these guys have written some great books and if you want to pursue it, those would be great starting points. We're putting together a course on mindfulness that will be on our website soon enough. But you know meditation if you were to just decide to sit in a place where other people aren't around and to put all of your attention, as best you can, on your breath. Notice yourself breathing in, watch yourself breathing in and out, be aware of that breath, be aware of how the breath feels, coming in and out of your body, notice how your mind fills with thoughts, and all you do is just return your attention gently, without effort, without judgment, without criticism. Just return your attention back to your breath and the mind's going to keep throwing stuff at you and all you do is continue to try to keep your focus on your breath and that's why they call it practice, because it's a son of a gun to try to do and you just give yourself five minutes to start, just spend five minutes trying to do it and if it gets frustrating, just let it go. This is not life or death. This is not that important. This is just practice. This is just learning to be able to put your attention on your breath.
Speaker 2:There was a period of time when I practiced meditation really frequently, a couple times a day, and I reached the point where I could actually keep my attention on my breath without other intruding thoughts for two whole breaths and I considered that like a major league success. Right, that's huge. If you can keep your attention in one place for 10 seconds, you are having enormous change. Most people can't, and it's not because they don't want to, or it's not because they're bad, or it's not because they're weak. It's because they haven't practiced. And so it's really just about practicing keeping your attention where you want it, holding positive thoughts for as long as you can, and not judging anything or anyone, including yourself, as you try. Give it a try.
Speaker 2:It can't hurt, it can only help All right, well, that was a good one hope that helped we'll see you later we hope you enjoyed today's podcast and that maybe it helped even a little. If you have any questions, we would love you to send them along in an email to info at somhypnosiscom. Thank you for being part of the State of Mind community. For more information about hypnosis and the various online or in-person services we provide, please visit our website, wwwsomhypnosiscom. While you are there, why don't you book a free one-hour journey, meeting with Hillary or Les, to learn more about what hypnosis is and how you might use it to make your life what you want it to be? Bye for now. Talk to you tomorrow, thank you.
